I feel a disturbance in the force: Obama is close and his lips are moving.

As long as he keeps talking about the Minnesota Vikings football team, we’ll all be okay.

You’re right, I felt so much better when Bush and the republicans were in charge. Boy those were some great times huh?

Eric in Austin

Sigh. You win. Feel better now? I’ll go one better: I personally accept responsibility for all the bad things you attribute to government. Perhaps now we can move toward discussing and creating the pro growth atmosphere every good Keynesian knows we need in order to bring our economy around without going further into debt.

Yes, Chas we should hire more postal workers to widen their loss and hire more governmental workers to make government bigger. Give them guaranteed jobs for life I say. Maybe we could deploy the new hires to continue the government’s study in the sex life of a chicken or deploy them with the porn-surfing S.E.C.

Great, just great.

Only if we supply them all and their families with iPhones, iPads, iPods and iMacs.

Signature

Waiting to be included in one of Apple’s target markets, but I still own an iPod, iPhone and iMac and APPL stock.

Enough with the politics in Intraday, people! Take it to Death & Taxes!

There’s nothing for you to see here that’s caused by any government policies or lack thereof. Keep moving.

Exactly right.

Because economic policies are inherently not political. They are A-political. The absence of politics. A void. A null space between thought and action where nothing seems to ever take place. So when we’re talking economics, clearly there isn’t anything political about it. So what is the problem we innocently ask?

I’m glad that among this August crowd somebody noticed my dig on Keynesian theory. The problem we face is something like stagflation. Government debt is high enough that if (or rather when)aggregate interest returned to the century old mean average of 6%, at our current levels of productivity, 25% of total tax revenue will go toward servicing interest on our debt and we’ll be forced into some type of structured austerity.

Even so, economists of every stripe (even Keynesians) understand that any type of austerity implemented without corresponding growth in place to take up the slack will create a contraction in GNP and with it increased likelihood of recession.

As a result of our present circumstance, to my way of thinking, we need to pursue stimulus by pushing pro growth private employment policy hard even at the cost of other do-good initiatives because we cannot employ everybody in government jobs and neither can see long afford to put everybody on the government dole when our debt is already at an unsustainable level (presuming inflation cannot devalue our debt before we realize 6% aggregate yields on our treasury debt).

Wasn’t it Kenneth Galbraith who coined the word “stagflation?” I never thought I would hear that again. We need a new word.

I think so. Somehow we find ourselves in a period of time where everything we own is deflating while everything we need is inflating in cost.

Hopefully, the Royal Families will continue to flood markets with cheap crude, which at least in America can act as a real stimulus as fuel costs come down.

I’m glad that among this August crowd somebody noticed my dig on Keynesian theory. The problem we face is something like stagflation. Government debt is high enough that if (or rather when)aggregate interest returned to the century old mean average of 6%, at our current levels of productivity, 25% of total tax revenue will go toward servicing interest on our debt and we’ll be forced into some type of structured austerity.

Even so, economists of every stripe (even Keynesians) understand that any type of austerity implemented without corresponding growth in place to take up the slack will create a contraction in GNP and with it increased likelihood of recession.

As a result of our present circumstance, to my way of thinking, we need to pursue stimulus by pushing pro growth private employment policy hard even at the cost of other do-good initiatives because we cannot employ everybody in government jobs and neither can see long afford to put everybody on the government dole when our debt is already at an unsustainable level (presuming inflation cannot devalue our debt before we realize 6% aggregate yields on our treasury debt).

Wasn’t it Kenneth Galbraith who coined the word “stagflation?” I never thought I would hear that again. We need a new word.

Indignation

Signature

Waiting to be included in one of Apple’s target markets, but I still own an iPod, iPhone and iMac and APPL stock.